Barnes & Noble is pulling back on its investment in the Nook, its line of tablets and ereader devices.
Throughout 2012, B&N pushed hard to get readers of books hooked on the Nook. But now it looks like it’s conceding that fight. B&N has announced it is going to put the company’s focus on acquiring content (i.e., ebooks) and on signing deals with Microsoft and Samsung for distributing that content. (Note that they don’t mention working with Amazon.)
This is the latest twist in the ongoing battle over who will control the reading habits of the world’s expanding population of avid book consumers. Ereader devices and tablets in the book business have generally been a losing proposition. Even Amazon, the leader in the field, actually makes no profit selling its Kindle hardware. It sells Kindles cheap in order to undercut its competitors and get the public to buy ebooks, where the real money is.
The transition from paper to pixels has been hard on the big publishing companies, but their vicious struggle to outdo one another is an ongoing boon for us: readers, writers, and independent publishers.
The Stateless Man
I (Mike) will be on the Stateless Man radio show on the Overseas Radio Network Monday at 1:30 pm EST to talk about Idle No More, the huge indigenous protest movement here in Canada, from a libertarian point of view.
If you haven’t checked out the Stateless Man with Fergus Hodgson yet, I suggest you give it a try. Fergus is a libertarian writer and adventurer with fascinating guests every week — including, this week, an Icelandic girl whose name was outlawed by her own government. You can listen in tomorrow via the Overseas Radio Network’s online player.
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